Black Phone 2 takes place four years after The Black Phone and features the same characters and child actors, now four years older. This I thought was really cool, both the growth of the actors and the realistic treatment of the characters in the aftermath of their experience with the serial child murderer the Grabber. Naturally, Finney is scarred, self-medicated, and angry from his kidnapping and imprisonment and having to murder his tormentor to escape. The caring and protective relationship he and his sister Gwen have, however, has also grown. When Gwen begins having the same dreams their mother had about a series of murders that took place at Alpine Lake Camp in 1957, Gwen with Finney in tow travel to the Colorado mountain camp to find the missing bodies and uncover a mystery regarding their mother’s suicide.
Watching Black Phone 2 made me want to rewatch The Black Phone. It looked like it was really good, which it was once I revisited it. The first half of Black Phone 2 is also good and has the same realism and subtle supernatural elements as its prequel. Unfortunately, the second half falls into the common trope many horror movies do where the ending gives up on living up to its expectations and devolves into ridiculousness.
Throughout the movie, Gwen is tormented in her dreams by the perpetrator of the 1957 murders, who turns out to be the Grabber. His spirit has returned from death, and he reveals that he can harm and even kill her in her dreams. Eventually, Gwen overpowers him in her sleep by lucid dreaming. Gwen’s found ability to overpower him in her sleep somehow translates to her having this ability to do so in reality where his spirit has been gaining power from the missing bodies of murdered campers. This leads to Gwen being overpowered and undefeatable by the final fight scene, which also features the Grabber on ice skates and imagery suggestive of a horse-drawn Zamboni.
Alpine Lake Camp also has an identity crisis. The camp and counselors are all constructed as if it were going to be a typical summer camp. One of the camp counselors even has a stereotypical Texas drawl. It’s the dead of winter, however, and it’s miserable outside to the point where the camp is canceled due to road conditions. It’s so miserable in fact that it’s hard to believe the camp is located in Colorado. My friends and I kept wanting to say the characters were in Alaska. It wouldn’t have been out of place for the Texan counselor to say, “I’m just a Texas girl in the wild Alaskan mountains of Colorado.”
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